On Monday, Eli sat in the back row of
his essay composition class and slipped in and out of consciousness, struggling
to force himself awake by strength of will alone. He had spent the past three
nights chasing the Old Man until sunrise and had only slept for five hours
during the course of the entire weekend. His nocturnal habits were ravaging his
body and taking him well past the point of giddy exhaustion, to border on
self-cruelty. But Eli endured the discomfort without complaint. It was rare to
stumble onto the Old Man’s trail at all; and sometimes he and the others went
months without picking up a scent. After three consecutive nights of productive
pursuit, any level of fatigue seemed bearable.

Normally, Eli would have encouraged
the arrival of sleep, regardless of his surroundings. He rested infrequently and
couldn’t afford to be selective about the times in which sleep visited him. But
Eli happened to like this particular teacher and felt it would be an insult to
fall asleep in his class without a fight. The English teacher, whose name Eli
had never bothered to learn, genuinely cared about the subject and the students.
He cared about the tuition that everyone had paid to attend and about the
discussions that he tried to engage the class in. He was young, probably fresh
out of graduate school, and openly assumed that everyone in the room shared his
concern for the class. This blatant display of na´vetÚ always made Eli feel
guilty about his own apathy. So Eli made a conscious effort to act like an
interested student. He covered his mouth when he yawned, smiled encouragingly at
the teacher’s clever anecdotes and scribbled in his notebook at appropriate
times. And today, he struggled valiantly to keep his eyes open.

About halfway through the two-hour
class, the teacher assigned the students a freeform exercise. He instructed them
to write, without pause, about the topic of their upcoming essay. Eli happened
to be awake during the explanation of the assignment, so he picked up his pen
and feigned the role of a dutiful student. The exercise ended promptly after
five minutes and the teacher demanded that everyone set their pens down. Then he
gave the class another five minutes to reread what was on their papers and
highlight interesting themes or ideas. The purpose of the assignment was to draw
out thoughts that the students might explore in their later writings. A single
sentence, written over and over again a half dozen times, covered the top eight
lines of Eli’s paper. The sentence read: “Alexander the Great conquered the
civilized world by the age of twenty-one.”

Eli’s essay didn’t concern Alexander
the Great at all. The assignment involved watching a contemporary sitcom and
discussing what, if any, social issues pervaded the episode. Then the students
had to contrast the show and its issues with the ideas and attitudes of a sitcom
from the fifties. But the teacher had instructed them to write what came to
mind, taking care to avoid conscious interference, and Eli had done as he was
told. It was late November and he had celebrated his nineteenth birthday only
three weeks earlier.

After the reread, the teacher offered
the class a choice of taking a ten-minute break or continuing with the second
hour of the lesson uninterrupted. He added the stipulation that, if the students
agreed to continue straight through, he would dismiss them fifteen minutes
early. The class, which included a large number of smokers, took a vote and the
ten-minute break won by a landslide. Immediately after the vote, half the class
stood up and left, many without the intention of returning. The teacher excused
himself and left to use the restroom. Eli stayed seated in the back and
positioned his notebook so that no one could see his hands as he scratched a
message onto the surface of his desk. With the tip of his pen he carved the
sentence, “When I sleep I dream of fire,” above another inscription that read,
“FTW I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers.” Afterward, he returned his book
to its previous position on his desk, placed his pen on top of it and turned his
attention outside. He gazed out of the nearest window and watched as the gray
sky turned a dark, bruised color before finally fading to black.

A pretty girl with dark hair sat off
to Eli’s left and as he stared out at the sky, she called over to him in a
conspiratorial voice. The girl was slim and curvy and overly polished, the
physical manifestation of most of Eli’s fantasy lovers. Eli knew the girl in a
casual, classroom sort of way but had never learned her name. So when he turned
to face her, he lifted his head in a stiff nod to let the girl know that she had
his attention, rather than offering her a polite, personalized greeting.

“Did you take my Harry Potter pen?”
she asked with a smile, as she glanced around her desk and checked the floor.
The girl sounded playful and coy but Eli was unable to tell that she was
flirting. He rarely ever looked into a strange girl’s eyes and, as a result, had
difficulty in reading them with any degree of accuracy. Her intentions didn’t
matter to Eli though. He didn’t feel like playing or flirting. So he shook his
head and said “no” flatly, as if the girl were actually accusing him of robbing
her pen.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Eli said. “I wouldn’t take
your pen.”

“Can I borrow a pen from you then. I
think someone took mine.”

Eli lifted his book bag onto his desk
and began rooting through his belongings. It was a polite gesture and nothing
more. Eli carried the same items with him everyday and he knew that a second pen
was not in his inventory. His bag held a spiral notebook with a yellow cover
that he had used for the past two semesters; a blue pen with an AmeriCamp logo
embossed along its side; a hardcover edition of The Saga of the Volsungs;
and a wooden mask, painted white with smoke-stained streaks running up and down
its face. After searching for a quick minute, he informed the dark haired girl
that he didn’t have a pen for her to borrow.

“Will you keep an eye out for my
Harry Potter pen though?” she asked. The classroom was mostly empty and the
girl’s eyes were practically gleaming with a desire for some attention but Eli
didn’t notice. He nodded a cold response to her request and they didn’t speak to
each other again for the remainder of the class. The teacher returned a few
minutes later, asked the members of the class to settle down and then opened up
his textbook to an essay on the structures of families throughout history.

“So, okay,” he said. “What do most of
you think of when you think of a typical American family? Normal, rather. What
does a normal family consist of?”

An Asian kid who sat in one of the
middle rows near the wall raised his hand and described a normal family as a
married couple with kids.

“Okay, that’s good. What about
grandparents?”

Without raising a hand, someone
announced that, under the guidelines of a normal family, grandparents didn’t
live in the same household as their children.

“What does it mean to belong to an
extended family?”

A tiny girl who sat next to the door
described an extended family as a unit that included people outside of the
normal members who were linked by blood in some way to the household.

“Normal members?” the teacher asked,
trying to remind the students of the definition first given.

The Asian kid who had supplied the
first answer raised his hand and said again, although a little quieter this
time, that a normal family consisted of a married couple with children.

“Okay good. Now I’m sure some of you
have studied Roman civilization, ancient Roman civilization I mean, either here
or in high school. Right? Most of you are familiar with ancient Rome, Caesar and
gladiators and all that. Does anyone know what the Ancient Romans considered to
be a family?”

No hands were raised. The essay that
served as the basis for the discussion, which had been assigned to the class a
week earlier, focused on the family models used by Western cultures. The ancient
Roman version was the first type mentioned in the text.

“Anyone? No one. Okay people, please
just remember to check your syllabus because there is at least one reading
assignment scheduled per week. Maybe I forgot to mention this one.”

The teacher had reminded the entire
class of the reading assignment during both meetings of the previous week. He
even mentioned it twice during the Thursday meeting, in which he cut short
another discussion because no one had read the essay on the gun culture in
America. The semester was half over and he had faithfully reminded the students
of their weekly assignments during every single meeting. He had also handed out
two copies of the syllabus to each student, had listed the readings on the
College of Staten Island website and personally bought two copies of the
textbook and reserved them at the campus library for those that couldn’t afford
the book.

“So, how about, everyone turns to
page 334 and we’ll … if you didn’t bring the book please look on with the person
next to you. Does everyone see the paragraph on 334 that starts ‘The typical
Roman household’? That’s where we’re going to focus. Now it’s important to
realize that a Roman family didn’t link itself through a blood bond. Instead
they believed that a family consisted of all the people who lived in a
particular household, whether they happened to be related by blood or not. This
practice even extended to Roman slaves who often … ”

Even before the actual idea
materialized in his mind, Eli felt an odd, almost primal, fear bubble up in his
belly. Seconds later, a strange thought crept over him as he listened to the
teacher summarize the essay that he hadn’t bothered to read. Eli felt an oily
slickness wash down from his hairline to his chin and immediately realized that
his face was dripping off his skull in one long, slow, undulating wave. Eli
lifted a hand to his head and ran the tips of his fingers down his skin. The
surface he touched was smooth beyond compare, devoid of any bumps or divots or
noticeable texture. The bulge of his nose was gone, along with the indents of
his eye sockets, the ridge of his forehead and the slopes of his cheeks. A
featureless, sterile oval stretched out beneath Eli’s touch where a fully
formed, although wholly unremarkable, face had been only minutes before.

Without thought, Eli stuffed his hand
into his book bag and gripped his mask. It was a desperate act, in the way that
a man about to tumble off a staircase will involuntarily reach for a handrail.
The wood was rough and unforgiving and he wanted to snatch it out of his bag and
press his face into it. But the teacher droned on without pause and the other
students busied themselves with anything but the lesson. Eli felt as if he were
safely anonymous for now, so long as he didn’t make any sudden movements or call
attention to himself and his face. He slowly removed his hand from his bag,
folded his arms across his desk and buried his head in the crook of his elbow.
The class continued uninterrupted as Eli reminded himself wordlessly, over and
over again, that none of this was real.

Real or not, it had been happening to
him frequently in the past few weeks and on average occurred almost once a day.
For the first time in his entire life, Eli actually considered the possibility
that he might be insane. He’d once heard somewhere that a person who questions
his own sanity is sane by default, since such an act requires a certain level of
objectivity not common among the mentally diseased. But that idea gave him
little solace as he sat quietly in the back row of his English class, cradling
his blank face.

Rooster had warned him long ago that
the shift between lives would be a graceless affair and Eli had believed him
from the first. Over the years he’d often witnessed peculiar scenes while
outside of the mist’s embrace. Much like a lack of sleep, they were a necessary
inconvenience that came with the pursuit of the Old Man. Sometimes he would pass
a bathroom mirror or catch a glimpse of his reflection in a glass door and see a
clean, peach slate. Other times the mask would be staring back at him, even when
he knew it was tucked away safely at home or in his book bag. But those had all
been isolated cases with months or even years separating each episode.

Recently, as the incidents became
more frequent, he had taken to carrying the mask with him everywhere and at all
times of the day. Something about having it close at hand eased his mind in a
way that nothing else could. He knew that it was nothing more than a thin piece
of wood covered with a layer of paint but it helped, in the same way that a
nightlight will help dispel nightmares.

But even the mask couldn’t wash away
all the byproducts of Eli’s graceless shift, all the intrusions and odd visions
that seemed to bleed together. A prime example was the arm in the puddle and the
fear that it had left in him. The arm was an image that would stay with Eli
forever, an image whose impact couldn’t be diminished by time. Last week, he had
been crossing the street when an entire arm, black and bloated and glistening,
had reached out of a shallow puddle and tried to clutch at his passing foot with
a gnarled hand. The motions of the arm had seemed only a blur to him; and by the
time he reached the sidewalk, the limb had vanished and the surface of the
puddle appeared completely still again. But the event had left him shaken and so
disturbed that he hadn’t told the others about it, particularly Rooster. If
Rooster had heard, he would have wanted to return to the street under cover of
the mist, find the puddle and attempt to dive into it.

The class was supposed to end at
twenty after six but the teacher let the students out fifteen minutes early,
despite the ten minute break that they had voted to take. As everyone filed out
of the classroom, he reminded them to read the essay regarding images of
violence toward women presented in the media and to think about how those images
impacted public attitudes.

“Start outlining your essays,” the
teacher said, as kids pushed past him obliviously. “Try to find a handful of
interesting ideas to focus on. And form an opinion. Don’t be noncommittal.
Hammer away at your points because your audience might not listen otherwise.”

Eli waited until everyone had left
the classroom, including the teacher, before packing up his belongings and
leaving. No one paid him any attention as he sat in his corner seat and stared
off through the window, seemingly lost in a daydream. He locked his head into an
odd angle, keeping his face turned away from the room, and a strategically
placed hand covered a large part of his secret until he felt safe enough to let
down his guard. An unmistakable silence and stillness settled down on the room
and Eli knew he was alone. He stood up, slipped into his flimsy sweatshirt and
zipped it up to his chin. Then he pulled the sweatshirt’s hood all the way up
over his head until a pale gray flap hung down to the middle of his forehead,
slightly obscuring his vision.

Eli walked down to the campus center
without drawing any attention. Strangers passed him in the halls and on the
campus’ sidewalks but most of them were focused elsewhere and wouldn’t have
noticed if Eli were naked. Occasionally people lifted their gaze as they crossed
his path, trying to make some polite eye contact, but the sweatshirt’s hood
blanketed his face in shadows. It was dark and the campus’ streetlights that
stood guard at every intersection threw off weak beams of pale, white light.
They failed to illuminate much of anything and helped to keep him hidden from
the world.

He dug around in his pockets as he
moved, trying to scrounge up as much money as he could for a quick meal. The
last time he’d eaten was the night before, at around eight, when he’d bought two
slices of pizza during his walk home from the bus stop. He found eighty-seven
cents, ninety-two counting the Canadian nickel in his back pocket, and decided
to buy a Snickers bar for the ride home. At the vending machine in the campus
center, a squat kid with a backwards hat and two arms filled with books stood
staring at the limited selection of candy for a full fifteen minutes before
making his decision. He ignored Eli’s polite coughs and continued to block the
entire machine until finally purchasing a bag of Fritos. Then the kid collected
his chips and his change and turned around, slamming directly into Eli like a
fullback executing a perfect block. Books flew everywhere, but the bag of Fritos
stayed firmly inside the kid’s tight grasp.

Red-faced with embarrassment and
anger, the kid bent down and glared up from the floor as he collected his books
and stacked them back into his arms. Eli watched impassively; and when the kid
asked him to pass a textbook that had fallen nearby, Eli kicked his foot out in
one swift motion and sent the book skidding across the hallway in the opposite
direction. The kid mumbled something under his breath and then chased after his
book.

Eli bought a Snickers bar and ate it
slowly as he walked off campus and up a few blocks to his bus stop. The trip
from the campus center to the bus usually took him about twenty minutes, but he
walked slowly and made it there in a half hour. His bus arrived ten minutes
after he reached the stop. Eli boarded the bus and then took a seat near the
back, where it seemed least crowded. The only other passenger nearby was a
raggedy man who sat across from him, rocking back in forth in his seat as he
hummed an unrecognizable tune. The raggedy man had an oddly shaped head that had
been clean-shaven once, but was now covered with short, bristly hairs and matted
with grease. His big, doughy hands were stuffed into a pair of ancient wool
gloves that had the tips of each cloth finger snipped off, exposing the man’s
dirty nails and the scars that arced across the pads of his fingers.

The bus’s engine flared up and the
street and sidewalk outside started to drift past, blending into a blur of
unrecognizable scenery. Without warning, the raggedy man started to snap his
fingers, laying down a rapid beat that complimented his hummed tune. Each
audible pop seemed louder than Eli would have guessed possible, considering the
man’s age and infirm appearance.

“Didn’t anyone tell you its winter,
boy?” he asked suddenly, his fingers never slowing. “Late fall, I mean, late
fall. But still, cold as winter.”

“Well if you feel it then why don’t
you wear your jacket? You own the jacket, right? Not like anyone is asking you
to buy the jacket. You got it, why not use it?”

“I like the cold.”

“Not like this you don’t. This is
cold like winter. Don’t nobody enjoy this.”

“No, I do. I like the cold, cause it
lets me know that I’m not dead yet.”

The raggedy man opened his mouth to
respond but paused like a stutterer caught in the middle of a tough word. “What
was that?”

“I said, I like the cold because the
discomfort I feel lets me know that I’m still conscious … still sentient, that I
haven’t ceased to be. Sometimes I just need a reminder.”

The raggedy man tossed his head from
side to side and leaned in as if he hadn’t heard Eli correctly. Eli didn’t
repeat himself a third time, so the man dismissed him with a wave of his pudgy
hand and turned his attention away from the stalled conversation. Then the
raggedy man patted himself down and stuffed his hands into the deep pockets of
his overcoat. The humming didn’t resume after the snapping died away.

The bus continued on its route,
stopping and picking up new passengers while dropping off others. No one went
back to sit near Eli, who adjusted his hood nervously every two minutes, making
sure that the flap of cloth came down as far as possible and stayed close to his
skin. Sometime during the ride, an uncomfortable sense of claustrophobia settled
down on him and the sudden urge to flee the bus and step outside flared up from
a place deep inside. Eli recognized the sensation immediately. Buses have a
certain smell and feel that permeate from inside them, caused by the body heat
and breath and presence of all their passengers. During most rides, people crack
their windows and vent this stagnant air; but on cold days, open windows release
heat as well as air, so the windows often stay closed. As a result of breathing
in recycled air and sitting in the sickly warmth of complete strangers, people
often act peculiarly on buses during the cold seasons.

Eli once witnessed two teenage girls
arguing in the back of a bus a few weeks before Christmas, while on his way to
the mall to do some shopping. The feud escalated and one of the girls pulled out
a box cutter and sliced open the other’s cheek. The wounded girl touched her
face in shocked disbelief just as the bus came to a sudden stop. She stumbled
backward, reached out to grab onto a pole in an effort to steady herself and
then dragged her bloodied palm across a nearby window, leaving a smeared
handprint on the Plexiglas. Although he couldn’t remember a single gift he
received during the holidays that year, the image of that handprint, and the
feel of that bus, never left Eli.

He debated fleeing the bus for a
quick minute and decided that a walk would do him good. Outside, on the
sidewalks, people minded themselves and kept their stares to a minimum. Eli
pressed the strip of plastic that signaled requested stops and strolled off the
bus at the next available opportunity. The bus had passed about a dozen stops
but still had a long way to go before reaching Eli’s. The walk home took nearly
an hour. Once home, hr set his things down in the middle of his apartment and
tossed off his hooded sweatshirt, taking care to avoid the small mirror that
hung near his bathroom door. He rummaged through the fridge and found a bag of
frozen, curly cut french-fries to be the only edible item in the entire house.
Eli turned his oven onto four hundred degrees and set the bag of fries down on
the counter to defrost.

While waiting for the oven to
heat up, Eli took a seat on his awful couch and skimmed through his political
science textbook. He flipped to a chapter on the obsolescence of major war in
the modern era. He had an in-class essay exam to look forward to on Wednesday,
but studying didn’t worry him. He knew the material well enough. The textbook
served as an excuse for avoiding his real work, writing for Rooster. Eli owed
Rooster two weeks worth of summaries and had been promising their prompt
delivery for the past few days. Rooster endured the delay without complaint
though. He knew that Eli often fell into sullen, unproductive moods but that he
always delivered eventually.

Eli fell asleep on his couch sometime
during the argument that ethnic struggles within a country threatened world
peace more than any other type of aggression. His nap didn’t last long. The
phone rang shortly after his eyes closed. Even under normal circumstances, he
disliked talking on the phone and avoided it as much as possible. He often
walked to the nearest pizzeria to place his order in person, like a human being,
rather than request something from an anonymous voice over the phone. So in
retaliation for being awakened, he stubbornly refused to answer the call.

After about six rings, the house fell
back into relative silence. Then the second call came and rang a full fifteen
times before quitting. By the third call, Eli gave in and walked to the kitchen
to answer the phone, motivated by aggravation alone and not by any desire to
find out who was trying to reach him.

“Hello?”

“Meet us at Rooster’s house.”

The voice on the other end of Eli’s
conversation belonged to his best friend in the entire world, Michael Bellamonte,
or Bella as their childhood buddies had dubbed him.

“Can’t.”

“Liar. Get here soon. We’re going to
meet somebody.”

“I’m not coming.”

“Why not?”

Eli explained that he had a test to
study for and an essay to write by next week, in addition to the work he still
owed Rooster, but Bella didn’t believe any of it.

“Seriously,” Bella said. “We’re going
to leave, in like, an hour.”

“Good. Have fun. I’ll see you
tomorrow.”

“You’re coming.”

“I’m not.”

Eli and Bella argued back and forth
for a few minutes, neither man budging even slightly. Bella called his friend a
hermit and demanded to know why he wasn’t coming out. Eli supplied the same lame
excuse over and over again; and when Bella ordered him to come out tonight with
the others, Eli refused flatly.

Suddenly some muffled noises passed
through the phone, followed by a loud bang as the receiver on Bella’s end
smacked against something hard and metallic.

“Hello? Bella?”

There was no answer. A few seconds
later, the sound of three distinct beeps came through the phone.

“Sorry sorry, I’m at a pay phone. I
dropped the phone and had to scrounge around for some coins cause my minutes
were up. Everything okay, Easy?”

The nickname Easy was Eli’s
alternative to his real name. The same kids that had dubbed Bella had bestowed
the title upon him. Very few children in the neighborhood where Bella and Eli
grew up had only one name.

“Yeah, everything is fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I know your sullen voice and I think
this is it.”

“Shut up, you don’t know anything.”

“I’ve been you friend since before
puberty changed your voice. I know what you sound like when you get in one of
your ruts.”

“You’re a lunatic.”

“Have you written those pages for
Rooster?”

“No. I told you that already.”

“Why not?”

“Listen, I’m fine. Just got some work
I have to get to.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

There was a brief silence as Bella
contemplated the conversation.

“Easy?” he asked.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll be over in a little while.”

“No, you don’t have to come over. I’m
… ” Eli heard a dull thud, followed by an audible click, and then a crisp dial
tone rang in his ear.

Out of the corner of his eye, Eli
caught a glimpse of an image in the mirror outside his bathroom. His peripheral
vision filled with ruddy colored flesh and a mass of darkness. Curiosity bit
down on him and before he could stop himself, Eli turned and stared at his own
reflection. To his relief, he saw that his facial features had returned
completely; but he also noticed a glint of green light that seemed buried in the
centers of his pupils. As he stepped forward to inspect the reflection of his
eyes closer, the odd glow winked out of existence and his normal gray eyes gazed
back at him.

Eli hung up his phone and turned away
from the mirror to see Maia staring through his kitchen window with a bored
expression drawn across her face. A small window over Eli’s kitchen sink faced
directly into the bedroom of the next house, and only a few feet separated his
window from that of his neighbors. When the lights were up, he could see
everything that happened in the room across from his kitchen. That room belonged
to the youngest daughter of a family of five, a fifteen-year-old girl named Maia.

Maia and her family had moved from
West Virginia to New York when her mother’s cancer worsened unexpectedly, in
search of better treatments. Her parents brought some strange religion along
with them; and although Eli had never learned the name of their church, the
basic tenets of the faith seemed to be that the Devil was everywhere and New
York was Babylon and Maia was the whore riding atop the ten-headed beast of the
apocalypse. Maia’s parents kept her locked away in her room during a large
portion of the day. They literally shut the girl’s door and bolted it, refusing
to let her leave without good reason. Her room had no TV or radio; and in the
year that Maia had lived next to Eli, he’d witnessed her spend only five minutes
with a friend in her bedroom unsupervised.

Eli waved to Maia and she waved
back half-heartedly. She was sitting in a beanbag chair in front of her only
window with her neck craned upward, trying futilely to gaze up at the sky. Eli’s
roof obscured her view but even if Maia had enjoyed a clear glimpse at the sky
she wouldn’t have seen much; the stars, as always, were mostly absent that
night. Pollution and the combined glare from the island’s garish streetlights
usually blocked all but the brightest of stars.

Eli lifted his textbook off the table
to show Maia that he was in the middle of studying and she raised up a floppy
textbook from her lap as well. The cover of Maia’s book was red and Eli
recognized it as a Russian language workbook; he’d seen it a few times before.
As they sat by their respective windows they skimmed through their reading
assignments, together in solitude, and occasionally looked up to catch each
other’s stray glances. After fifteen minutes of studying, Eli realized that he
had been interrupted during the start of a much needed nap. So he folded up his
textbook and strolled out to his couch where he fell asleep in minutes.

Sometime later, a sharp sting, like
the jolt of pain that accompanies a mosquito bite, raced across his forehead and
snapped Eli back to consciousness. He peeled open his eyelids and saw Bella
staring down at him. His first thought upon stirring was that Bella might be the
strangest sight in the world to wake to. Bella refused to shave because he was
incapable of growing a full beard; and as a result, a dark mat of sparse stubble
covered his cheeks and parts of his neck. Although the mangy whiskers might have
seemed appealing on a different man, the shape of Bella’s face prevented him
from enjoying the benefits of the facial hair. Bella had a thin face with tight
skin that hugged ever bone of his skull and pulled his lips back over his teeth,
giving the appearance that he didn’t possess enough skin to cover his head. His
hair hung down to his shoulders, straight and unwashed, and two crescent moons
of discolored flesh ringed the lower halves of both his eyes.

“Wake up you stupid cunt,” Bella
said. He lifted his hand and flicked Eli in the forehead, eliciting another
burst of stinging pain. Bella’s fingers were long and bony and capped with
unclipped nails.

“What? What time is it?”

“Don’t know. You don’t have one
goddamn clock in this whole place. You’re oven was on when I came in, by the
way.”

“Did you shut it off?” Eli leapt off
the couch, sending his political science textbook tumbling to the floor, and
dashed into the kitchen. The bag of curly fries stood on the counter, resting in
a small pool of water from the melted ice that had once clung to the outside of
the bag.

“No I warmed my hands over it. Of
course I shut it off.”

Eli took a seat at his kitchen table,
folded his arms across the tabletop and laid his head down onto the backs of his
hands. Bella strolled into the room and took a seat opposite him at the table.

“Wake up cunt,” Bella ordered. “Come
on, we’ve got to go.”

“Why are you calling me a cunt?”

“That’s my new thing. I’m calling
everyone a cunt now. Like the guys in England and stuff, Great Britain or
whatever, always calling each other cunts.”

“That’s dumb.”

“Sorry, we all can’t be as dignified
and classy as you. Wake up stupid.”

“I’m acting like this because I
haven’t slept for more than five hours in the last three days.”

“Oh wow,” Bella said, drawing
the “wow” out into a long and obnoxiously sarcastic sound that rose and fell
with a singsong pitch. “I haven’t slept since last Wednesday. Right now, I’m
just riding it out … waiting for the crash, man. And if it doesn’t come soon,
I’m just going to use the Scarecrow remedy.”

Eli and Bella shared a mutual
acquaintance named Scarecrow, a man who had received his handle long before he’d
met either of them. Scarecrow had the perfect nickname because he was tall and
lanky and his hair grew up into a thick, curly puff that ballooned outward
around his entire head like the soft end of a Q-tip. Over the years, Scarecrow
had developed a technique for dealing with an interrupted sleep schedule. The
remedy involved consuming a bottle of cheap wine along with a bottle of Nyquil
and then riding a bus for a few hours. The secret of the remedy was the
intangible power of a bus, which often causes passengers to become unbearably
tired. The sedative effect of the ride was hard to determine exactly. Some
people thought it might be due to the slow rolling of the huge machine. Others
blamed the almost rhythmic stop-and-go motions that the driver caused by
constantly having to switch between the gas and the brake. Scarecrow himself
believed that the people who rode buses were generally an exhausted collection
of vagrants that exuded undetectable sleep pheromones. Whatever the reason, the
remedy worked but only in a pinch. It never truly helped insomnia because the
subject hadn’t regained the ability to fall asleep, but had instead enjoyed a
quick reprieve from his curse. Fortunately Eli and Bella didn’t suffer from
insomnia, just a poor lifestyle.

“Wake up!!!” Bella slammed his fists
up and down on the table, creating a booming drum roll that lacked any
discernable rhythm. Eli didn’t move at all so Bella stood up and checked the
empty fridge. “Maia’s up,” he announced suddenly.

Eli lifted his head off his arms and
glanced toward Maia’s room just in time to see the girl cross in front of her
window. She tossed him an absentminded gesture with her hand and Eli waved back.

“You got a beer there?” Eli asked,
noticing for the first time that Bella held a clear glass bottle in his left
hand.

“Yeah, you want some?” Bella closed
the refrigerator door and opened up the freezer.

“Hand it over.”

“Only if you agree to come out with
us.”

“Unlike every girl that you’ve ever
slept with, I can’t be coerced with a sip of beer.”

Bella chuckled and then slammed the
freezer door shut. He stood in place for a long minute, watching Maia with the
purposeful stare of a patient hunter as she moved about her room.

“Goddamn it, I don’t know how you sit
here and stare across at her.”

“Got to feel bad for that kid. Her
parents keep her locked up in that room everyday. I swear, they don’t even let
her out on the weekends. I just try to entertain her … at least give her a link
to the outside world or something.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Bella said.
He left his post near the fridge and sat back down at the table, taking the seat
opposite the window so that his view of Maia’s room was unhindered. “I
understand why you stare at her … give her some company or whatever. I
just don’t know how you actually do it. She’s adorable. I can’t look at
her for more than five minutes without wanting to smash a brick through her
window and jump across to her room, throw her over my shoulder like a fucking
pirate and just take her.”

“She’s fifteen,” Eli said, trying to
sound like the voice of reason without coming across too stern or zealously
protective. He understood Bella’s point; describing Maia as adorable seemed like
a cruel understatement. But he would never admit that he found her attractive,
not to himself or others. In his eyes, Maia’s age trumped her beauty

“Don’t have to tell me,” Bella said.
“I’m not the one staring at her every night.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Whatever man,” Bella said with
a smile. “I’m not here to judge.”

“Why are you here?”

“To draw you out of your cave.”

Maia crossed back in front of her
window and fastened a sheet of paper to the glass with some tape. Then she
collapsed into the beanbag chair that always sat in front of her only window and
stared across at the two young men, her elbows placed on the windowsill as she
rested her chin in her palms. Her eyes, as always, looked big and sad and her
mouth was locked in a sulk that might have appeared cute if it didn’t hint at
her troubles. Eli noticed that her hair fell down past her shoulders in subtle
waves of loose curls and that it looked red when viewed from certain lighting
angles. On the sheet of paper attached to the window, the word “CONVICT” stood
atop a giant arrow pointing downward.

“Must be really clamping down on
her,” Bella said.

“Think she did something to her
hair. Didn’t it used to be darker … straighter too. I think it used to be
straighter.”

“That’s probably why they’re
punishing her. She dolled herself up and now she’ll feel their wrath.”

“Poor girl.”

“Girls like that, girls with
strict parents … they become absolute animals when they finally break loose. Bet
she’s like a power line, like a goddamn turbine, of sexual energy, just waiting
to be tapped into.”

“Shut up.”

“What?”

“What kind of a thing is that to
say about a girl?”

“Just an observation.”

“Well I don’t need your stupid
observations,” Eli said. “Did I ask for one? Did I? No, I didn’t. So leave her
alone, she’s just a kid.”

“Sure thing, old timer. You
forget that we were fifteen only four short years ago?”

Eli didn’t answer. He had only
been participating in the conversation on a superficial level, adding comments
that seemed appropriate at times that seemed reasonable. Bella’s remarks about
Maia’s sexual appetites had stirred him enough to snap him out of his own
thoughts and cause him to focus on the discussion, but now he returned eagerly
to his interior monologue. His mind drifted to the only question that he ever
considered when he sat and stared over at Maia. Rooster once called it the
“eternal question”, the endless debate over the degree of connection between the
two separate individuals.

Sometimes Eli suspected that
Maia could read lips; and if she couldn’t, then he didn’t understand her reasons
for staring back at him. Whenever she sat in front of her window, he tried to
entertain her as best he could but he never did much. The physical limitations
of the their rooms and the impassable space between them hindered their fun.
They made stupid faces at each other and goofed off and played with shadow
puppets. During the summer, Eli had brought his TV out onto the kitchen table
and watched Mets games with her. But most of the time they just stared at each
other blankly and mumbled to themselves, like two lunatics talking to imaginary
therapists. His best guess was that Maia felt comforted by the knowledge that
someone -- anyone --recognized her plight; but beyond that, he never understood
what she got out of their time together.

Bella laughed out loud and
slammed his hand down onto the table. “Goddamn it. That’s a good one. You’re a
funny guy, you know that?”

“I swear. Want to check my
syllabus?”

“No, I don’t give a fuck about
your syllabus,” Bella said, enunciating the last word with dramatic pauses so
that it sounded like sill-uh-bus.

“Sorry, big man. Academia calls
and I must answer.” Eli stood up, walked out of the kitchen to retrieve his
political science book and then strolled back in with his face buried in the
text. He took a seat at the table and started flipping through the pages slowly,
pausing occasionally as if he were taking note of pertinent facts.

“You’re an ass.”

“Why? Cause I have a test?”

“No, because you don’t give a
damn about that test. You know it and I certainly know it. The only reason you
even go to school is to collect financial aid checks so you can live in this
grand estate.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you
tonight, Bella.”

“Why not?”

Eli closed his book with a deep
sigh. He tossed a nervous glance over his shoulder and was relieved to find the
face staring back at him from the mirror was his own.

“It happened again today.”

“What happened?”

“Right in the middle of class
Bella. Without any sort of warning.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My face … that blankness.”

Bella took a long sip from his
beer bottle and nodded with understanding.

Bella coughed quietly, clearing
his throat as he stared off into space. A detached, thoughtful expression crept
over his face and Eli knew the answer to his question from that look alone, knew
in the way that only two friends who should have been born as brothers can
wordlessly know each other.

“It’s happening more frequently
too,” Eli said. “Almost once a day for me. Sometimes its quick and other times,
like today … ”

“We should talk with Rooster
about this.”

“We both know what Rooster would
say. He’d call us a couple of pussies and question our loyalty to the hunt.”

“Still, he should know.”

Eli shrugged. “Whatever. I guess
so.”

“Come on. Let’s get out of
here.” Bella hopped up out of his chair and started to pat his pockets, looking
for a pack of cigarettes that he didn’t have. He walked out into the living room
and then back into the kitchen, where he paced anxiously in front of the stove
like a little kid waiting outside a movie theater trying to building up enough
courage to sneak inside. “Suddenly, I need some fresh air.”

Eli agreed to go for a walk only
after Bella promised to buy him something to eat. Before they left, both men
dragged the TV from the living room to the kitchen and placed it on the table.
Eli flipped through the channels until Maia found something that she liked and
signaled for him to stop on a Discovery Channel documentary about primate
families. The program wasn’t very educational without sound, but Maia thought
the baby monkeys looked cute.

Eli and Bella left the house and
wandered up the street toward an all night deli that stood a few blocks away.
Their plan was to buy a single sandwich and split it, since Eli had no money and
Bella had only five dollars. They cut in and out of narrow side streets as they
walked, wandering in crisscrossing circles for no reason at all. After drifting
up and down a dozen blocks they stumbled onto a squad car perched in the parking
lot of a closed gas station, waiting with its lights off to catch any drivers
who ran the light of a nearby intersection. The two cops immediately spotted the
beer that Eli was enjoying, charged out of their car and shouted at him to dump
the bottle out on the ground.

Eli complied without protest but
Bella mouthed off and turned his outrage on the two officers. He shouted at the
cops indignantly, demanding to know who got paid to catch criminals while they
sat in a gas station and accosted harmless citizens. The beer hadn’t been Eli’s
to discard, since Bella had purchased it and only consumed a quarter of the
bottle, but the cops didn’t care about Bella’s ownership rights. One of the
policemen, a slick Italian type who looked like a mobster without a suit,
offered to make Bella a criminal by charging him with public intoxication and
underage drinking and then dragging him down to the precinct. Bella thanked the
cop for his compassion and then snapped to attention, throwing a stiff arm into
the air like a Nazi lieutenant on parade. The cop gave Bella the finger and
ordered Eli to move his friend before he got himself into trouble.

“Home of the free,” Bella
shouted, as Eli dragged him away.

“Go home and have a warm glass
of milk, sweetpea,” the cop yelled back.

Eli dragged Bella for two blocks
before the enraged man finally calmed down and stopped resisting. The walk to
the deli was relatively calm afterward. Bella bitched out loud about cops and
the idea of policing in general and shouted for everyone to rise up out of their
homes and storm the police stations. He pointed out that the citizens of the
island outnumbered the police by about four hundred to one and that an uprising
would be painless if everyone stuck together. But his words incited nobody and
only a handful of people even bothered to look out of their windows and find the
source of all the noise.

The deli was a shabby building
with a low ceiling and a garish sign that advertised the establishment’s name
and specialties in white and green florescent lights that were bright enough to
blind anyone who stood and stared for long enough. The sign claimed that the
deli was open “25 hours a day and 8 days a week” and Eli doubted that claim,
although he had seen it open on Christmas day as well as Thanksgiving. Inside,
Eli scanned the racks for the cheapest drink available while Bella ordered a
Turkey sandwich. An old woman with thick glasses and stringy hair stood near the
door and mumbled incoherently to herself as she rifled through a dozen lottery
tickets like a poker dealer.

“No winners,” she announced
suddenly. “Not today.”

Eli found a one-liter bottle of
nameless cola that cost fifty cents and handed it to Bella.

“I win all the time,” she said. The
woman’s lips were thin and wrinkled and when she spoke, they scrunched together
into an odd little oval, as if she were making a kissing face at the end of
every word.

“Really? How much.”

“I think the most I won was
six-thousand but I always give it all back. I keep playing and give it all
back.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Yeah, thanks. One time I won two
thousand and then five hundred two days in a row. Back to back, you know.”

“Is that right?”

“Absolutely.”

The guy working at the deli finished
making the turkey sandwich and tossed it onto the counter next to the cola
bottle. He rang up the charges and the total came to four dollars and change.
Bella paid with his five dollars and took the items without asking for a bag.

“One time I won three hundred dollars
… or, no I thought I won three hundred but it was actually fifty. That happens
sometimes. You look at the numbers and you think that they’re the ones on your
ticket but they’re really not.”

Eli gave a polite chuckle and
strolled out of the door behind his friend. They sat down on the low curb of the
sidewalk together, ripped the sandwich in half and ate with all the couth of two
pregnant hyenas. The sandwich lasted about three minutes and Eli’s taste buds
didn’t even have time to register the flavor of the meat before the meal ended.
Afterward Bella opened the bottle of cola, sipped from it slowly and then passed
it to Eli who took a long gulp and handed it back. The drink was thin and overly
sweet and lacked a great deal of the fizz that other carbonated drinks often
had.

“We got to get to Grasmere,” Bella
said. They had enjoyed a long silence and the partially digested food was
settling into their needy stomachs. Breaking the quiet seemed almost criminal
but it had to be done. The matters of the evening had to be tended to.

“For what?”

“That’s where Rooster and Nav are. I
left them at some girl’s house.”

“Who?”

“Some girl I know.

“Who is she?”

“Don’t know. Hoss introduced her to
me.”

“Hoss?” Eli practically spat as he
said the name.

“Yeah.”

“When were you hanging out with Hoss?”

“Saw him on the train. He was with a
few people and he came over to introduce me to everyone. What could I do? Get up
and leave the car or something?”

“Probably not but I’m sure this girl
does. If not we can just skip the fair.”

Eli shrugged noncommittally, as if
the plan didn’t matter to him either way. Suddenly he heard the sound of a
ringing bell, followed by shuffling feet, and he turned around to see the old
woman with the lottery tickets walking out of the store. She inched her way
methodically along the sidewalk, as if she were about to tumble off of a tight
rope, and then changed her direction when she spotted the boys. She walked over
to the curb and stood next to Eli, staring out onto the nearly vacant street
with uninterested eyes.

“What cab you want to call?” Eli
asked, completely ignoring the presence of the stranger.

“Speed,” Bella said. “If we got to
ditch the cab fair then I want it to be a Speed cabby who gets stuck.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Bella stood and walked to the nearest
payphone to make the necessary call, leaving Eli and the old woman alone
together on the curb.

“You’ve got to keep playing if you
want to keep winning.”

“What?” Eli asked.

“That’s why I keep playing. My sister
thinks I’m crazy cause of all the money I spend on lotto. But she don’t
understand that I got to keep playing if I want to win.”

“Is that right?”

“Absolutely. She can’t understand
that. I don’t know why.”

“Maybe she thinks that if you saved
the money, instead of spending it on the tickets, you’d make out with more in
the end. Despite the winnings.”

“I don’t know about all that.”

Eli shrugged and sipped from the
bottle of soda. “So long as you can spare the money, what is it any of her
business?”

“That’s right, I got my own money.”

“There you go.”

“She don’t even have her own money.”

“Of course not.”

“She’s got a husband who owns a tow
truck. That’s where she gets all her money. One time my car broke down near her
house so I walked over and knocked on her door to get her husband to come and
tow me. She opens the door and says ‘Pat, what are you doing? Walking through
the neighborhood.’ I says to her, ‘No, what kind of a lunatic goes walking in
the middle of the night?’”

Eli laughed and set the bottle of
soda down, tightening the cap so that he wouldn’t be tempted to drink it all.
Bella returned after making the phone call and informed him that the cab would
be here in fifteen minutes.

The two young men waited for the cab
impatiently, trying to maintain a steady conversation while ignoring the old
woman’s pointless interjections. Fifteen minutes passed in what felt like the
span of an hour. A few stray cars rolled up and down the four-lane boulevard,
but otherwise the street belonged solely to the three restless figures that held
the sidewalk. Bella made a second call, a half-hour after his initial call, and
returned with the same news. The cab was to arrive in fifteen minutes.

Twenty-five minutes later, a dented
minivan with a rusted bumper pulled up to the curb and honked loudly. The van’s
windshield was smashed in both upper corners and the word “Speed” was stenciled
between the two sets of spider web cracks that stretched outward from the
damaged areas. Without saying goodbye to their newfound acquaintance, both young
men stood up and entered the makeshift cab.

Three teenaged girls occupied
the front row of seats so Bella and Eli made their way to the second row and sat
on opposite ends of the car. Eli placed his book bag in the empty seat between
them.

“Where you headed?” the driver
asked.

Bella supplied the driver with
the name of the street and a phony house number. The driver removed a
walkie-talkie from his dashboard, pressed the small button on the device’s side
and informed his dispatcher that he had picked up ride 18. Then he returned the
walkie-talkie to its clipped position on the dashboard and sped off down the
street, blowing through a stoplight that stood on the verge of turning red.

Background noise filled the cab
as all three girls talked at once and an easy listening station leaked through
the speakers and the dashboard squawked with messages from cabbies and
dispatchers who occupied a common frequency. Eli couldn’t single out any one
particular sound so he turned his attention away from the inside of the van,
choosing instead to stare out of his dirty window and watch the rush of houses
pass.

Bella leaned forward, resting
his arms on seats in front of him, and poked his head into the conversation of
the three young girls. They noticed him immediately and their talk came to a
sudden halt as all three girls turned to look at him curiously.

“Hey pretty girl,” Bella said,
focusing his attention on the girl who sat nearest to the sliding door. She had
long, dark blonde hair and muted eyes that looked as if they hadn’t seen an
interesting sight since birth. “Ever read Catcher in the Rye?”

The girl laughed at Bella
dismissively and then turned a wide-eyed look toward her two friends, who began
laughing as well. Bella remained perched on the back of the seat, like a vulture
eyeballing a dying creature persistently, and waited for an answer.

When the girl near the door
finally realized that he wasn’t deterred by her rudeness, she fixed a curious
gaze on Bella. “What?” she asked.

“No? Never read it? Good book.
You should pick it up some time. My name’s Bella.” He offered up his hand and
the three girls stared at it with disbelief, before bursting into another round
of laughter. The noise made by the girls wasn’t a delicate, bubbly giggle filled
with humor but, instead, sounded like an unattractive bark dripping with
disdain. The sound was so grating that it shook Eli out of his daze and returned
him to the scene taking place in the car.

“I’m sure it is,” the girl said.
She made no move to accept Bella’s offering, so he dropped his hand against the
side of the seat rather than withdrawing it.

“And you are?”

“A complete stranger.”

“For now anyway.”

“Excuse me, we were having a
conversation before you interrupted.”

“Sorry about that. Sometimes I
forget my manners when I see a beautiful woman.”

Or a snotty bitch, Eli thought.
He kept his mouth shut though. Bella was a big boy and deserved to fail on his
own accord.

“Well you should try to fix
that,” the girl replied.

“I know I should. But I’m really
hopeless when it comes to pretty girls.”

The girl near the door passed an
agitated look to her friends and all three girls turned their backs
simultaneously, ending their own conversation and leaving Bella stranded. Bella
gave a nonchalant shrug and sat back in his seat without even a hint of
dejection or embarrassment. No one talked for the rest of the ride but the radio
station and the walkie-talkies filled the vacuum, preventing the car from
plunging into total silence. The cab pulled up to the girls’ stop, an all boys
catholic high school that was holding a winter dance party. The girls paid their
fare, left the driver a dollar tip and then slipped out of the sliding door. The
driver radioed to his dispatcher that ride 17 had been dropped off and then cut
a U turn across a double yellow line and sped off toward Grasmere.